08/20/2025

Employee Loneliness Impacts Your Bottom Line

A new study shows 25 percent of respondents say they've no friends on the job

The growing number of companies requiring employees to spend more days, or even the full work week, in the office helped drive workplace occupation rates in July to their highest mark since 2019. But despite an average 80 percent of workers now being back at their desks each week compared to their pre-pandemic levels, an alarming number of people say they still feel lonely at work. That perception is one that managers need to resolve in the interests of both isolated employees and their performance of their businesses.

As Inc. reported earlier this year, the rising number of people feeling cut off from coworkers, even as they all pursue work in the same relatively confined space, has led several organizations to sound alarms about the phenomenon. Among the loudest of those was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which recently called spreading workplace loneliness a risk for “companies that significantly affects employee performance and engagement.” A recent survey of 2,000 employed Americans now offers new insights into how the problem has continued to grow, and found a quarter of all respondents saying they haven’t made a single friend on the job.

The study was commissioned by automated game grid company Bingo Card Creator, which said it wanted to measure how “connection-hungry the modern workplace really is” today. What it found was that while an average employee spends 90,000 hours, or over a third of their lives, at work throughout a career, 64 percent of survey respondents said they’ve felt lonely during that time — with 10 percent saying they often experienced that isolation. That’s up from a 2024 Gallup poll showing about one in five workers reported loneliness while on the job.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Inc.